


Child, You're A Beauty

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: To Die as Lovers May [8]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: 200 years of slow burn culminates TONIGHT, Blood, Cisswap, Done Poorly, F/F, Fisting, Mention of past trauma, No really they're doing it wrong, Rule 63, Sex, Unsafe Sex, healing factor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 20:43:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8592886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: Whatever Louisa's doing with Danny, it was inevitable that Lestat would learn sooner or later. And when she finds out--She takes her tale to the other wounded party, and over the course of an evening becomes closer to Armida than they've ever managed in all their tumultuous past.





	

**New Orleans  
1991**

The first thing Lestat noticed in her walk up to Louisa's pitiful little shack was the smell of wood smoke. It made her heart lurch in her chest. But the ramshackle place was not ablaze (not yet, at any rate, though God alone knew when last the chimney had been swept).

No, it was simply being heated. Lighted. The decay set aside and made more bearable by the warm glow of a fire and beeswax candles set in jars, cups, cut-crystal stemware all about the rotting front room.

And what did Lestat see, by the light of that nostalgic golden light?

Not her chaste, demure darling weeping. Not her pious scholar or her industrious little seamstress. Not her eternal, repentant mourner. No, Louisa had seemingly taken it upon herself to leave those roles behind when unobserved by her most devoted audience.

For Louisa was... Entertaining. And seemed to enjoy the endeavor, going by the secretive smile and low, throaty laugh half-muffled by her guest's kisses.

(And here was Lestat, skulking by the open window like a common thief.)

For an instant, an eternity, Lestat convinced herself that it was a victim--some tall, slim young man with blond hair and entirely too much confidence. A cruel jest indeed, to allow him to begin disrobing, that smooth pale back shining in the candlelight.

And then they turned, rolled, and the illusion shattered. She saw small, pointed breasts with hard nipples, one adorned by a silvery ring.

Sharp modern face under short modern hair streaked purple to match the glittering, hungry eyes; of all people, surely Lestat should have known better than to assume.

Hands with bitten nails covered in chipped black paint rubbed gently, rhythmically, over Louisa's magnificent bust, and she was smiling. She was  _ smiling _ .

Touching back, over visible ribs and permanent tattoos and small strange scars. Kissing, again, but not the thin-lipped mouth.

Neck, and breast, and belly and--

Lower, as Danielle whispered "Holy Mother of God" and spread her legs at the slightest prompting.

(Little tramp, but who could blame her?)

The unearthly aspects of their nature could make anyone alluring, and Lestat found her eyes briefly glued to the hypnotic roll of hips as Armida's fledgling (gone astray, it seemed; and wouldn't a certain jealous little harlot be interested in knowing that) gave herself over to Louisa's elegant ministrations. 

Lestat had never even thought - 

It couldn't be allowed to stand, this vulgar modern girl encroaching on Louisa's sweetness. She was so easily led. So in need of protection, as she always had been. 

But Lestat had learned a fraction of planning in her long years, her several deaths (if only barely). If she stormed in, she would only be Louisa's villain once again (she'd thought...it had been going so  _ well _ ). 

When in need of a conniving shadowy hand, there was only one other soul to turn to.

Lestat's mind was a turmoil of images by the time she arrived at Armida's home. She'd stayed, beyond knowledge, beyond accident or propriety, held by the need to truly  _ see _ .

And see she had.

It had been such a sight--Louisa's head cradled between the thighs of Armida's creature, shorn locks affording a view of the subtle flexion of her neck, the steady press of Louisa's beautiful face into Danielle's beautiful sex. 

The soft sucking sounds and gentle moans which were and were not like those of feeding.

It was no vague, apologetic politeness or thanks Louisa did; the heaving of her shoulders and the desperate clutch of her hands had shown that.

(There was blood in Lestat's mouth and a cut on her knuckle. Her love had been bewitched.)

What she felt then, at the sight of her beloved wantonly, contentedly lapping at Danielle's folds--it surpassed anger or envy.

The wet sounds, the soft laughter; all should have been Lestat's.

Most particularly the pungent trickle of red she could see staining Louisa's knelt-up legs.

She wanted to pull those legs apart and thrust into what lay between, what she'd only barely touched when Louisa lay helpless and hopeless in glorious ruination two hundred years past.

They were  _ vampires, _ for God's sake. Who would have thought--

She stayed until Danielle reached her crisis, writhing and swearing and pledging eternal love, of all things. She didn't stay to hear Louisa's answer, instead bearing the images and her grief off to the other wronged party.

They were long past Paris, in so many ways--now Lestat could easily sense the amber eyes watching her from the dark, hear the most minute contractions of muscle as loud as steps. She wasn't prey anymore, not to anyone. 

And yet when she saw the slight form emerge, both of them silently agreed that the game was up and no violence was to be wrought, it was like that first meeting all over again. Armida was swathed in white lace, the sheerness of the camisole somehow more suggestive than if she'd been wearing nothing at all. The careful knotting of thread swirled around the considerable heft of her bust, dipping to highlight her slight curve and into the shadow of her hip. Armida had dressed for an audience--and not Lestat. 

"Why are you here?" Not accusing but flat, head tilting slightly to the side. 

"Charming as ever." The riposte came without thought, muscle memory under the distress.

"Charm is your skill, not mine." True enough; even as master of a troupe, 'charm' was never what drew people to Armida.

She looked waifish there in the warm night air, hotel penthouse high enough that none would observe her half-clad on the balcony. Her hair swayed gently in the breeze.

"Well, it pains me to say your meager charms have failed, and brought me trouble as well." Lestat perched on the rail, a refreshing rush of adrenaline spiking at the combination of Armida and great heights.

"Trouble follows you like a cloud. I see no reason to bring me into it." Armida's expression was already growing distant and bored. 

That dismissal, more than anything, galvanized Lestat into throwing her knowledge out like a blow. "Your fledgling's been busy warming other beds. Ones that are spoken for."

"Oh?" There it was. One long brow arched in curiosity.

Lestat felt the sly nudge of an outside hand trying to whisper its way into her thoughts, demand clarification. She rapped the metal of the railing in warning. "Use your words. You're a big girl."

"You want to tell me. Otherwise you wouldn't have come." 

And...well. Damn her. "I don't care what your little reporter does. But keep her away from Louisa."

"And here I thought you said the girl in question was spoken for." Armida smiled coldly, emptily, expression aped just as when she danced as a puppet. If there was emotion beneath it, it was frozen and chained.

"Did you not hear me--"

"Louisa has not been your chattel since 1865," she said, stepping foolishly close while saying such inflammatory things. "Has not  been anyone's at all since your charms failed us all in 1929."

Bitterness and incoherence, riddles and lies.

"Why, you--"

"Has she not earned the chance to be with one who loved her so long?"

"Precisely!" Lestat sprang like the predator she was, captured her old 'almost' unresisting in her arms. "She’s mine, found again, and your--"

"You are not the one I meant, O Prince."

"Y--" Her face went blank, and then. "Hmph. I should've known. More fool I for thinking your interest might still hold. But you've sucked her dry already and abandoned her to eternity." 

"No." Not outrage but simple correction. "Danielle is very dear to me." 

"You don't even know the meaning of the words, doll." The old insult came easily. Porcelain and perfect and lifeless. Smash her open and find only emptiness. Even now Armida was frozen in her arms, refusing to look at her. "If you did, you wouldn't dismiss this betrayal." 

"I told her to go." 

Lestat's anger turned on a dime. A mortal's bones would've broken in her grasp. "Still looking for your little revenge? Trying to take what I love? It wasn't enough that you--" what a tangle of thorns, that. Despair and anger and remorse and deep, deep beneath that, relief. 

There was the smallest hint of a fanged smile on that face. "She would have anyway. Some night. Now she’ll come back to me."

Letting a lover run off into the arms of another, slake her needs in the mortal way and then no doubt return for her maker's blood--

"Not everything others do is in relation to you, Lestat." Armida was slight, so tiny Lestat held her on tiptoe. "In fact, it may pain you to hear that our choices frequently have nothing to do with you."

"I know that--you'd throw me to Perdition in an instant, all for a new love." (The wounds were old, scarred-over rather than raw, but the betrayal still stung.) "But to use Louisa--you knew her, Armida." Knew her in Paris, travelled and accomplished and ravishing in a new, odd way visible even in her distress, even through Lestat's fire-dimmed eyes. "Have you no pity in you at all for her delicacy? Her naivete?"

Armida blinked, slow, reptilian, and for a moment she seemed  _ so like _ Claude. Something in the pause, the facade. And then that Botticelli mouth opened in laughter.

"Lestat, my love; my enemy; my nothing. You know so much of me, more of my origins and past and hopes than anyone before you sold them for a penny dreadful.

"What on this twisted Earth makes you think Louisa is still naive, after you and I both had our fill?"

Never, never her fill, Lestat thought. They were vampires. They hungered.

The kiss was sudden and not rough, but experienced.  _ Knowing _ in her seduction.

Sexual. Voluptuous.

Lestat had tasted those lips ages ago, and done violence when they sought more.

Now this pretty, empty doll tempted with her mouth, her false little sighs, the press of her full breasts against Lestat's (unbound, she'd left them unbound, it was so much easier now, and now she was feeling it--)

"What did you do?" she gasped, breaking away, hands already inside the white silk peignoir and eyes full of malevolent porcelain and amber and auburn.

"Do?" Armida was already seeking her lips again, freezing stiff when Lestat pulled back. 

"Don't play coy." Even if it was her favorite game. One she always won. She only seemed able to draw breathe in gasps. "This. You're..." Lestat had never had trouble resisting, no matter what curiosity lurked in the back of her mind. But she didn't let go. She couldn't move away.

"I am here." Long, delicate limbs pulled her in, gave the illusion of giving up. "Isn't that all you wanted?" 

This from the creature who had given an ultimatum for devotion or death. Louisa had described a thin and maddening song when Armida reached into her mind and shaped it. All Lestat could hear was the soft whisper of the breeze and her heart pounding with stolen blood. 

"Someone." A small pointed nose nuzzling into her collarbone. "Anyone." Her free hand pulled at the silken bows that held up her shoulder straps, pulling them loose. "I am no stranger to substitution."

_ La Perla's finest _ , Lestat recognized in the corner of her mind. She'd bought such things as gifts for Louisa.

While one side of the little nothing fell low, dangerously so, she grasped hips covered in low-slung tap pants and snuck her thumbs up beneath the cami's hemline.

"I want more," Lestat growled.

"Greedy, Prince. Would you have my love? My virtue?" Bitterest mockery, all those ethereal false things spoken by heartless whore Armida.

"Tell me what you did to Louisa."  _ Tell me whether you need to die. _

Such a smile, as thin arms wound about Lestat's neck and narrow hips shoved close. Broken. Damaged.

"Ah, Lestat, I only finished what you started." Cold kiss in the warm night breeze; they could make love, or their parody of it, right there with none the wiser. "Shall I tell you, or show you?"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" She tried to sneer, but it came out low and growling and charged. "Let you into my head to play with all the new toys.” 

"I've always wanted you." Armida pressed close, her weight bending them precariously over the railing. She smiled, sweet, as if nothing were wrong while Lestat's heels hooked between the safety bars for balance. "That's why you're still alive."

Fire exploded behind Lestat's eyes, gave her the strength to shove forward and topple them both to the ground. She held her prey by the throat, refusing (not afraid) to look at the way their struggle had bunched the peignoir down around Armida's stomach, her hips. "I should kill you."

"Will you?"

"You led Louisa to slaughter. It's your fault she's-"

"Happy?" A small smile - Lestat had been distracted, it seemed, from that ever probing eye. "I saw no means Danny might have used to threaten her." 

"I told you to stay out." Tender tissue, a poisonous windpipe, crumpled under Lestat's hand. "I'm not one of your thralls." And yet it must have been Armida's voice commanding her closer, begging her to touch.

"By all means, no. So what are you?" She showed no shame, too cracked for fear, as she arched to display her body and tugged at the collar of Lestat's shirt.

Vampires didn’t make love as mortals did. Couldn’t--it had been perfectly clear, from the time Magnus forced Lestat, foolish frightened mortal Lestat, down upon bedding of rotten velvet and hissed through long-missing teeth that she had not  _ that _ to fear, whatever else he'd do.

Yet Louisa had--and Danny was--

Vampiric lovemaking was better. Truer. Safer, more frightening, the most perfect thing Lestat had ever felt, with Louisa in her arms.

She barely remembered what Nicki had tasted like.

"I'm--God, Armida, she's different now. Ruined." Shorn hair, eager movements, jaw smeared with blood from no kill ever seen. "She was so reluctant. Proper. What did you--"

"I gave her what you gave her. She did not refuse."

Lestat hadn't Armida's talent for subtlety. She'd never needed it, content to blunder her way into danger and fight her way out as she needed. She turned that blunt hammer to Armida's mind now, smashing at defenses centuries in the making. 

It would've been just like Armida to give the illusion of victory, to let slip the smallest image of agony 

_ Louisa, body exposed and eyes dry, lost in indifferent thought as Armida licked at a long, deep wound across her back--  _

Lestat teetered at the edge of control, wanting so much to once more bash that head against the stone until it bled and lay still. "Torturer." She'd broken the skin of Armida's throat, blood pooling and mixing with auburn curls. "It isn't enough that we be monsters. You. You would bring Hell to those that trust you." 

"She agreed," Armida said again, the whisper more with her mind than her ravaged voice. 

"Liar. She didn't - she. You put her under some cloud. She would've agreed to anything with your poisonous thoughts in her head."

"Ask her then. Go back to them. You might still catch Danny if you do." She smiled, blood leaking from the corners of her lips.

"You want to be free of your misbegotten that badly? For if I find her there, practicing your perversions--"

And  _ that, _ at last, was apparently a bridge too far. That made Armida wriggle and snap, her girlish features transformed. Feral, a little mad fox spreading brain fever.

And images of Louisa leaked like an attack--visions of her on silken sheets, pliant and receptive. Naked but for fine gems at her throat and ears and wrists; and once, daring, shocking, a wink of gold at the nipple.

And Armida's body was small and thin, but she felt the same when Lestat let her hands wander, following paths in those memories.

Armida knew about women, Lestat recalled dimly. About men. Maria had spoken despairingly of the troubles with her disobedient ward, the dangers she had put herself in before Maria had been there to protect her. That experience flowed through Lestat's hands now, tearing the thin barrier of fabric that pretended at modesty. The body beneath her bent and tensed as Lestat saw herself kissing below the navel, above Louisa's soft curls (though none brushed her lips). It arched just so to allow easy access, meek and accepting of hands on small, firm cheeks. As she slid slowly lower and kissed that little bundle of exposed nerves. It  was...too perfect, every movement an exact replica of the woman who wasn't really there. Too willing to sell a fantasy, when Lestat had come here to find a partner in outrage. 

Lestat slapped her, hard, across the face. The images vanished, though Armida's expression didn't change. 

"That's what you wanted. Isn't it?"

"We never did that." Lestat had been an aristocrat, but Louisa a  _ lady. _ "She would have refused."

"Neither did we, for she knew not how." Armida's body was so smooth and pale, lacking even hair beneath her arms, let alone above the pink-flushed sex. "And you lie so poorly. Louisa could deny you nothing."

"She denied me everything." Lestat swung one leg to the outside of Armida's slim hip and began an old, slow rock against one with no virtue left to protect.

"Liar, liar," Armida whispered, hands fisted in her own hair, hips working. The handprint on her cheek was shocking--hot against Lestat's lips. "Any pain you gave, she swallowed unresisting. Any indignity you demanded, she submitted to. And still you would not love her in all ways."

Needles, knives, words were fangs piercing Lestat's thick hide. Mockery, as she gentled herself to squeeze breasts perky with long-ago youth.

"I thought she preferred it so, from all the memories. And so I gave her what you did."

"She didn't want that." Louisa had always looked wounded when Lestat was done with her. Those looks had haunted her, though they were never enough to stop the manic cruelty, the constant need to see if there was a line where Louisa would leave her behind like all the rest. "She never wanted that."

"And yet you gave it." Armida must have drunk deep of some poor mortal. Her face and chest were flushed, shamelessly openly appreciative of touch with no love in it. Lestat's thigh brushed her victim-tormenter's entrance and found it newly slick, quivering as she ran her fingers along soft ridges. They came back wet with blood.

She stared at them and found herself laughing, unaware of when she'd started or why. Such a thing, and they'd never. Never once with her true beloved had she thought to make use of these bodies that felt so deeply. It was only now, here--

Armida was watching her. That look thought Lestat a fool, an ignorant incompetent, without words ever passing those full lips. She talked too much.

Lestat dug her long fingers into the warm dark between Armida's legs, relishing the contraction and heat around her touch. Her touch soaked in blood, she pressed her digits to Armida's lips and pushed, not asking but demanding entrance: deeper until Armida had swallowed her own coppery poison down to the knuckle, her mouth stretched wide to accommodate the sizable invasion. Blood. It always came back to blood.

Armida's eyes fell shut and she moaned high and needy, a shrill squeal through her nose as she tried to snake a leg around Lestat's waist. Lestat caught the ankle absentmindedly, tugging to deepen their contact on her own terms.

Lestat's mouth watered for it, the smell hanging all around, and luckily blood washed off or blended into black leather.

The sight of her fingers in that mouth, implacable, was what she wanted. To see herself disappear inside a lover, stretching her. Wanted to be overwhelming. And yes, she went on, twisting, implacable, kicked off a vestigial gag reflex--and when she pulled slowly out Armida's lips tried to hold her. A hypnotic voice shaped some plea in Italian Lestat had never bothered to learn.

And at the last moment, Lestat slid the tip of her greatest finger to the side, rewarding them both with the pinprick touch of flesh to fang.

It was a small cut, giving off no more than a trickle of blood that mixed with Armida's, but it was enough to set fire to her aching cells. She brought her filthy hand, dripping with mingled blood and saliva and God knew what else, to her mouth; the salt and sweat sent a shiver through her, and she was jolted, her balance thrown off by Armida's sudden attempts to reach her.

She laughed, enjoying the freedom of cruelty. She couldn't hurt Armida. It was part of their old game to hold her down, paint meaningless red runes down her stomach while skating deliberately around her softest, sensitive spots. 

"Lestat." A terrifying warning from a round ingenue face, mouth drawn up in a snarl. How many had she killed. 

"Do I irritate you, doll?" Featherlight touch between her legs and gone again. "Frustrating that you can't bend me to your will?"

"It  _ irritates _ me to bed a coward," the little wench hissed, and the back of Lestat's hand split her lip in the white blankness without thought.

"Take that back."

"Is there some bravery in holding your lovers down, twisting them so they cannot even trust a chance?"

Flashes, images--Lestat's own face from beneath, lustful and cruel and strangely haloed with some illusory magnificence. There were hands reaching, voices asking, and always punishment following.

Images of Louisa on her back, stripped, adorned and waiting, hands above her head as though already tied. One of those hands was reaching again, shaking, testing Armida's flesh as though searching for the catch that would spring the trap.

"Shut up. You ruined her--shut  _ up.” _

Cracks in the pavement from Lestat's fists. Cracks in this lovely doll, spitting cruelty. Cracks in Lestat's mind.

"You're afraid." A shard of concrete had cut across Armida's cheek, sending a lazy trickle of blood down her face. "You have no true strength. Only threats." 

She needed to stop talking. She was in danger from Lestat's panicked mind if she didn't stop talking -

"Do you know why Louisa will always be stronger than you?"

Lestat was caught at last in the hypnotic power of those amber eyes, staring with a steadiness that betrayed none of the preceding violence. Her voice was gone.

"Louisa has survived countless hands on her neck. Mine. Yours. But if you ever tried to submit, you would break yourself. Your identity is a fragile bluster. Pathetic."

"You--" Lestat's fist came down in the space next to Armida's head, splintering the ground further. "You know nothing about me."

"I know you better than anyone. I don't share Louisa's romantic notions." Her hand stroked Lestat's cheek, cruelly gentle.

"Why, Armida?" she'd always accused, never asked, but she felt her spine softening like iron in a forge. Weak, weak, but she needed to know. "Why send your..." emissary? Pet? Lover, toy, gift? "Why change it?"

(Distant, centuries past, Lestat heard an echo of how she'd hated that dreaded 'why'.)

Armida's eyes closed, and her bruised face turned away before answering.

"Because she was dead, and neither of us could wake her. Dead and walking. There is so much fire, my friend. So much sun."

The truth of it hurt worst of all. Even when she'd come into Lestat's arms that fateful night, conciliatory after all that had passed, a part of her had been missing. She spoke as if through a shroud, apart from them all no matter how close she stood. 

Lestat's strength gave out then and she collapsed, covering Armida's small body with her own. The hand stroking her hair was patronizing, snide, but she took the comfort of it, shook with sobs that covered them both. She loved an audience for her triumphant returns, but never this. Never this broken creature left behind when she plummeted from her highs into the black depths of the Dark Moment and what lay beneath it. 

When the tears had mostly subsided Armida pushed her off, standing sticky and bloody and proudly naked under the moon, like some pagan goddess. "Come inside," she said, and didn't wait to see if Lestat would follow. 

She did, pulled as if on a string. The terrace opened into a lavish bedroom, painted in warm earth tones and swathed in silk and Egyptian cotton. Lestat moved to sit on the bed, ready to collapse on the nearest surface, and Armida stopped her. "Your clothes are filthy. You'll ruin the texture."

Lestat did not disrobe, as a rule. The last person to see her nude was Nicola.

No, that--that wasn't true.

Akasha.

He had seen her, looked his fill.

She had--he'd been--

Father of them all, and since when did she revere fathers?

Her many-zippered jacket hit the floor with a thud, her boots louder yet. Her flannel, her scarf, were easy.

Then it was a tank top showing her chest clear as though bare, and her hands on her belt with its lion buckle, and she was shaking.

She could smell blood already, evidence shameful and vulgar and  _ womanly _ of what Armida had made her feel.

Louisa would've helped, calmed Lestat's unsteady hands and taken the task from her with a martyr's patience. But Armida only stared, waiting as Lestat stepped out of her last protection and kicked it across the room--stood with hands on her hips as if to prove her fear was only an illusion. "Well?" She tried to preen. This felt like being hung on a hook for display. 

"You're covered in blood." Armida betrayed no excitement, as if she'd flipped a switch and the squealing little slut of minutes ago had never been. 

"That's the point, isn't it?" She jutted her pointed hips, feeling the damp bloodying her gold curls. 

Armida had already begun walking toward a door on the far side of the room, ignoring the display. "Come on," she called, when she saw Lestat wasn't following her. 

"You want me to play your pet? Is that it?" For a minute she forgot her nudity, prowling along the redhead's trail with the full intent of raising Hell (again). She found Armida knelt before a tub set into the floor, already half full of steaming water.

(no rose petals, but--)

She backpedaled hurriedly, her shoulder thwacking against the doorway and bringing her back to sense. It was only water.

Armida stared, glassy, as though Lestat were some bacterium to be examined beneath a microscope.

And Lestat was a hunter, not some quivering maid.

(Quivering maids could be so strong, could suffer and survive and laugh in candlelight--)

So she strode forward, careless, carefree, and kicked her toes across the rising surface. "I suppose you're no stranger to seeing how things found in the gutter wash up."

"Whom exactly do you mean to insult with that?"

She didn't even know, especially at the sight in the mirrored wall.

Lestat was not well-fed at her death, all broad shoulders, muscle and sinew and long strong limbs. She'd liked it that way; still did, when she was in control.

Now--put her in that water, soak her hair, and she'd be nothing. A drowned cat.

"Are you going to get in?" 

If it had been an order, Lestat could've railed against it. Absolutes were something she understood. But questions. She hadn't a head for questions 

_ "If you see it enough times, do you think you'll be able to fool them into not hearing your country accent?" Nicola had asked when she'd come back from Macbeth for the sixth time, her earnings practically on scrip to the reputable stage across town.  _

_ She'd stolen fine clothes and mimicked those she admired on the stage and, with her vampire ears, plucked learning from the very thoughts of those squatting at the top, wrapped it all around her in a magnificent cloak to create the magnificent Lestat. _

The phantom of a girl staring up at her in the water was knobby-kneed and underfed, outsized in every way but none more so than her mouth. Lost.

"Stop it." 

"What?" Armida tilted her head. "You haven't answered my question." 

She wasn't afraid. 

She put her foot out as if she was walking off a cliff, stumbled and folded into the scalded water. If she were mortal, her bones would be broken. 

Armida came to sit at the edge of the tub, now of all times uninterested in talking. Lestat expected a hand on her head to shove her under, but instead wet fingers began running through her hair, softening it by degrees and adding sweet-smelling soap.

"We act as we know," Armida said, her fingertips icy points of contact within the hot swirl of water. Rambling; contemplative. "We must learn new ways from our companions, or all perish."

Armida more so than the rest of them, Lestat knew. Wise and shallow, needy and strong. Mistress of her people and slave to them.

"Did it hurt, what you learned from my--from Louisa?"

"It kept us alive, for a time. It was not what I expected. There are photographs."

Lestat could see it, the white hands and vampire eyes flitting about a darkroom, the chemicals and papers and careful adjustment of a fascinating wonderful modern machine. Painting with light, camera obscura directed.

And somewhere farther removed, the subject of those silvered images waited, a beloved frozen in time and in states that would shock a mortal picture-taker.

"Do you have them?" She couldn't help asking. She'd loved filling homes with beautiful things, wearing beautiful clothes. But mementos. She didn't even have scars for that.

"She burned them, I think." Warm water over her head, a soft and gentle fall.

"Of course she did." How like her. How perfect, to be so tantalizing and then yank it away. She sank low in the water, out of Armida's touch. Her hair floated on top of the rippling surface, dead and lank and heavy. "You're not so clean yourself," she said suddenly.

"You're right." How long had she wanted to hear those words. "Get out, then."

She wasn't disappointed by the slight. She was-- 

"Whatever you please, mistress," she drawled, pretending she was glad to leave the heat. Armida was behind her, pressing against her back--but only to wrap a towel around her, and then she was alone again.

"Go dry off." Ordered again, and the hell of it was she went, the door clicking shut as she stepped over the threshold.

The room seemed enormous all of a sudden, too vast for the fire now dampened and sputtering. She sat at the vanity, looking at herself in the mirror. Same animate face, same grey eyes. Untouchable.

She had a vision of her mother, sitting at a mirror refined in Venice, carefully brushing out her hair. Lestat had watched from the corner, knowing it was a privilege to be this close, one her brothers would be denied, and yet afraid to ask for what she really wanted. She held herself instead, too small to be seen in the mirror consumed by Gabrielle's indomitable spirit.

And there was Armida, standing behind her. Looking young and hungry, looking like a crime.

So much of what they were was in their looks, unchanging forevermore.

"We were not skilled at gentleness. I thought that I had it, from Maria, but Danny taught me instead." Armida would not stand to be ignored, though Lestat was the one who lusted openly for a spotlight. She separated the few tangles in Lestat’s supernaturally perfect hair by hand and began a simple braid.

"Danny." Lestat snorted. "That rough stick? She has no delicacy in her, no propriety. A poor match--"

"Danny is good. Soft, loving." Implacable as the coven mistress, the nymph's eerie voice. "And don't disparage yourself so."

Another kiss, but this time Lestat was the shorter by her seated position. She tried to ignore the clumsy cold comfort of one who saw through her, shoved off the way her barbs looped around to herself, and yet...

Louisa deserved better than a rough woman. A vulgar woman. A stick, a gangling beast, an uneducated fool. A fame-hungry egoist who would whore their story to the printers.

Louisa deserved better than--

Louisa--

Armida's flesh was cool and smooth, and the scent of blood was back though neither had broken skin.

It was a perverse comfort just to be held, a childish need that she had long outgrown. Gabrielle had only relented when she begged, and only then as a child; Nicki teased her and then grew sharp when the summer heat didn't dampen Lestat’s enthusiasm for simple contact in the close air of their hovel. 

Armida held her without pretense, not as a step to the next act but a destination in itself.  The feeling of it was vivid: the press of her breasts against the knobs of Lestat's spine; The tickle of her red curls, already dry, against Lestat's shoulders; the tips of her fingers brushing careless-deliberately against the hard points of Lestat’s nipples.

She left blood on the seat when she stood (she'd done that as a child too, terrified at the sight of her courses and convinced she was dying, spilling her fears like a fool to Augustin when he ran across her. Never touched, while the woman touching her had seen a thousand grasping hands by that same age). 

Now Armida led her to the bed, told her to lay down atop the lavish fabric. "I thought you said I'd ruin it." She reached between her legs, wetting her fingertips for show. "I'm still bleeding."

No answer. None of their barbs or fights; just simple, infinite patience until Lestat relented, suddenly nervous at her pliancy as she lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling.

"All things are ruined, in the end. We outlast them; in fifty years' time these will be burned or rotted or pulped for pages in new books of our murderous confessions. It was not the linens which concerned me." Armida licked her lips, face burning with a terrible naked desire--inhuman, rapacious, and very, very old. "You are beautiful, my friend."

Lestat opened her mouth to sling another barb, but what came out instead--

"So are you."

She coaxed Armida close, feeling fumbling and awkward as she had in Nicola's bedroom long ago. But Armida followed, conscious docility matching Lestat's own. Planted a knobby knee to either side of Lestat's head on the huge mattress, braced her hands upon the headboard, and then.

Then Lestat tried her skills at an act centuries forgotten.

It was like kissing, she'd been told. Musette had patted her shoulder fondly in the wings, capping every lascivious story with the caution that Lestat was young yet. That she was to enjoy it when she could, for she would need to put aside childish things when she was older and get a husband. 

Musette was in the ground more than 200 years. That must've made Lestat older by now. And here she was, her face pressed into Armida's willing vulnerability, stroking and teasing and enjoying the way this small world shuddered around her. Blood was dripping down her chin, sweet and musky and intoxicating even if it wasn't the pure experience of the bite. 

Her fingers played at the folds of Armida's opening even as her mouth and teeth (careful) teased at her clit. Armida's moans were music too, high and threaded and withheld. But not for long. Lestat had determined she'd have all of it. 

The feel of her fingers sliding inside was different from not an hour before, slick and easy with the abundance of blood and warmth. The tissue parted and bloomed for one finger, then two, and at the third Armida groaned low in her throat and tense. Too much, maybe, or--

"More."

She pulled back with difficulty, leaving the fingers in place and flexing them in a pulsing motion, to ask

"More what? How do you like this, Armida?"

"I--I don't know. My courses never came, so my mistress never--and Danny didn't--" she nearly shrieked at the deliberate rub of a thumb to her nub, like the seed of pomegranates Lestat had seen. And Lestat tried her best not to laugh.

Such superiority, such worldliness--all of it just the wise elder routine, and would Lestat never learn?

Lestat tried her best not to weep.

Such naivete, from a girl who had experienced all Armida had.

She pressed a worshipful, featherlight kiss to the pubic mound, and twisted her hand to work in also the tip of her smallest finger. For long minutes she held like that, barely moving, seeking each gasp and sigh. She chased it, finding what worked and what did not until finally Armida's small hands tugged her hair, shoved her head back with cries of "not enough, not enough, more--"

"There is no more," Lestat said, chewing the inside of her cheek and trying not to let the bitterness she felt at that fact spill over.

"More--your whole hand, please--"

"I'll tear you, pretty girl." Lestat pulled herself free with a slurping sound, sucked at the coating of blood while Armida mewled disappointment. "Tear your marvelous petit minou wide, with this great fist."

"We're  _ vampires _ , Lestat. Even mortals can do it; I once--" Lestat toppled her, kissed her, before she could learn what Armida once.

The interlocking of their legs was easy now, slick with Armida's freely flowing blood and Lestat's own unaddressed need. Lestat had heard many a rumor about how her proclivities meant she was  _ supposed _ to be built, back in the day, the bearer of some swollen substandard cock pretending at manhood. She and Nicola had tried it once, legs akimbo, mounds smashed together and stomachs slick with sweat. It had gotten them nothing but frustration. 

But it had to be better than suggesting such damage. "We could--"

"It won't work." Her face had paled to a gentle pink, nothing like the abandon of minutes ago. 

"I told you to stay out of my head." Lestat pinched those slick, bloody nerves hard, earning a yelp too much like pleasure. 

"You scream it when you're like this." Her eyes were dangerously close to adoring, if Armida was capable of such a thing. "Your lust demands the world's attention."

Their next kiss was surprisingly gentle, Armida's arms wrapped around Lestat's neck as though they were in love. Something tender stirred in Lestat as she pulled away, a fragile fondness for one of the few constants in her long life. A fellow monster, She stroked Armida's hair absently, framing the image in her mind.

A small hand covered hers. "You're thinking of her," the eternal almost-woman whispered. For once, she was wrong entirely. "Don't. It will keep you from doing what I need." She brought Lestat's hand to her mouth, seeking the remnants in the future of her palm. Life line, long made a liar. Heart line, a series of broken islands that seemed to have no end. 

"I told you," Lestat captured her mouth again, deep and thorough, her tongue lacerated as she pulled away. "You don't know what you're asking."

"I know what I want to feel, Lestat." Her face was pale and terrible, and it must have been the eyes that did it; Lestat must have been enthralled. "I have always wanted you so badly."

"Pity you didn't want me well," Lestat said, stroking a hand down the clean line of Armida's side, underarm to hip, feeling Armida squirm into it. She was so  _ lovely _ , this girl who had broken Lestat over and over for want of her.

And why had Lestat ever refused?

"I wanted you as well as I could, and you accepted it as much as you were able." The bloodied space between her thighs looked like the destruction of innocence, and for all her arousal at the smell, the taste, Lestat looked away, burying her face instead in round breasts and pointed nipples and the darkness between where the heart beat so so slowly.

"Armida, we hurt our loves, you and I." Louisa, and Danny, and each other.

"But I ask it," Armida's voice vibrated the chest beneath Lestat's forehead; her ankles hooked about Lestat's waist with some terrifying finality. "I want you to fill me, to make me yours, like you almost did that night in Paris when I tasted you."

That night. Their first 'almost,' with Armida swept across the room in her arms and none the wiser as to what they were seeing. The quiet of the shadows where they thought themselves so cleverly hidden, and then-- 

Presumption and reaction and violence. The touch of sharp points at Lestat's neck had taken her back to that rotting tower, that rotting breath in her ear, and she'd-- 

But this was different. Lestat had never been asked to do violence (not true--so many had asked, demanded her to kill them, and then resented her for it). She acted, always, and in the face of a deliberate request her boldness threatened to wither away. 

Armida's fingers stroked down her spine as if she were a great cat, caught and trained. "There is no new evil you can discover in me, my dearest heretic. The territory is well mapped." 

Her words were wrapped in that indescribable music, thick like cotton in Lestat's ears. She shook her head. "I won't do it like that." She jerked her head up, cool eyes blazing. "Not as one of your puppets."

"If you're afraid," That mysterious, infuriating smile. "the only answer is to master me." 

"Fine,  _ fine _ ," she buried her head against Armida's shoulder and bit, hard, leaving dark bruises alongside the scraping of her fangs. "You know what you ask? With all you've lost?" The sheets beneath them were spattered like a marital bed.

"Nothing lasts, save ourselves. What better reason to ask than because of that loss?" And in the taste of blood Lestat could see a hundred nights, a hundred thousand, on beds that began sumptuous as this one and ended rotted-out as that on which Lestat had found herself--or been found. Beds with them and their lovers, and endings and beginnings linked not into a chain but a Gordian knot. Complications and breaks and discoveries, flat images taken and shared out among all their minds and held preserved in Armida's.

_ Let me learn from you _ , that voiceless voice asked as Lestat crushed her to the sheets like all the others she'd had since the night Magnus changed her.

(She'd been gentle once. Gentle and ignorant and so, so happy in the slant of afternoon light, stolen hours after hunting or before a performance--)

Nicola was dead, at her own severed hands and with the help of this poor twisted minx in Lestat's arms. What had Lestat been loyal to even back then, when the thought of touching Nicola's destroyer had pricked her with shame?

Time healed no wounds whatsoever, but they did learn subtler ways of creating them. So it was with Armida's wandering hand on Lestat's buttock, her waiting air, the glorious dripping wetness when Lestat relented and thrust two fingers back into that hole.

She closed her eyes so as not to see the certain-to-be smile of triumph, and so startled when another hand joined her own, rubbing at the clit to send forth a new gush of sweet-smelling lifeblood.

They had never held hands. There was no time for such luxuries in their small windows of kindness so long ago, and too often they were busying themselves with violence. The gentle brush of fingers, dangerously affectionate, was somehow more lurid than what she had been asked to do. 

At three she felt Armida tense, muscles already formed back into place by vampiric healing. Her movements slowed to a crawl, gentle and stroking, until she heard Armida growl. 

"Your great heart will be the death of us all." She pushed Lestat away, crawling onto her knees and then sinking forward, her chin rested on a fine brocade pillow (ruined, like everything else). "You needn't look at me if it frightens you so." 

The casual obscenity of it raised a blush on Lestat's unshakable features, the sight of blood trickling down Armida's spread thighs unbearable. The taste on her tongue was musky, melting and sweet, and she almost forgot her task before Armida nudged her hard with one delicate foot. 

Armida had deliberately hidden her face, leaving the only clue to her thoughts (as ever) in the strange, subtle movements of her body.  When they reached the plateau that had stopped her the first time, four fingers pressing and expanding as the sounds Armida couldn't quite swallow surrounded them both. 

"Do it," and the imperious coven mistress broke halfway through, moaning weak and needy as Lestat stopped moving. "I-- _ please _ , I need--" her voice became babble without meaning, her thoughts a crushing press of  _ want _ and desperation.

"Scream for me, Armida," Lestat said so softly a mortal wouldn't have heard it. She kissed a pale buttock, wondering what it would look like with the print of her hand across it. "Scream as loud as you'd like."

And then she tucked her thumb in and  _ pushed _ , hard, past the resistance of inhuman muscles. She ignored their clenching fight in favor of what her little lover had so vehemently requested.

More blood flowed, over her wrist, down her forearm, onto sheets and into the mattress. Not all was from arousal.

And Armida did scream, long wails followed by yelps, followed by small gulping sobs, and her hips moved so Lestat didn't have to.

She would heal, she would live, she would be no worse for wear after this--

She would fear no damnation, nor look back with eyes somewhere between desire, wounding, and  _ boredom _ .

_ Please, please _ , Lestat's lips chanted without her consent, lines from a play she'd never performed.  _ Please let me do this right _ .

Please.

Armida clenched and shook, orgasm clenching through her like a buffeting storm; and when she was still, her voice reduced to small, strained groans, Lestat tried to withdraw. 

"No." Armida tensed against her. "Not--not yet. Please."

"Did you not--" she'd thought it was over, that she'd heard the moment crest and die.

"It isn't that." Armida's voice was muffled through the pillows. "I enjoy the feeling." 

Blunt as always. And just as inscrutable.  _ "Why?" _ Lestat had striven to feel inviolate, in control of her body and any who touched it. The thought of submitting to something like this sent a shiver down her back. 

"This," Armida struggled to shift her hips, at the limits of even vampiric endurance, "is the physical reassurance of companionship. Completely," her breath caught on an aftershock, "full." 

"I don't--" she was sure she'd die before submitting so. And yet looking at Armida, stretched out and exhausted, she wondered. "Louisa would say something about Freud, I imagine."

“Louisa hates Freud.” Surreal, for Armida to be discussing this here, now, bodies locked together and minds touching at last. “Hates him completely, the Oedipal conflict--even Lacan’s use of the phallus angered her--” Lestat twitched her fingers, pleased at how the smallest movement could interrupt that recitative flow of words.

“You talk too much, ma petite.” Too much for centuries, and Lestat shifted awkwardly nearer, grateful for her long limbs as she kissed her way up the beaded knobs of Armida’s spine, towards that ever-moving mouth.

“And you are too abstinent, my Prince. What gratification do you--Ah!--require?” Armida gasped. Bloody sweat stuck coppery hair to her face, forcing Lestat to peel it away with her awkward left hand.

“None in particular.” Even though she could feel it dripping freely, even though she knew what a mess she’d be--the physical was less.

Her mouth watered at the curve of that thin neck, the slow vampiric pulse which promised liquid gold.

"Liar,"Armida whispered. "What was it he called you...father of l-augh!"

The slow healing of flesh was excuse enough to pull free, causing a torrent of fresh blood. They were filthy with it, both of them, Armida curled on her side with lingering pain. She should've known, trespassing over sacred graves. Should've-- 

"You're still afraid of me." Damn her and her simple certainty. Her soft, hypnotic gaze narrowed. "No. Of yourself."

"You make a poor doctor." She licked the blood clean from her hand, though the taste had gone sour with the knot in her stomach. She missed the closeness already, no doubt the influence of Armida's mind poisoning her own. And still that sweet vein, taunting her and now surely out of her reach.

Armida drew closer, though, kept her knobby knees tucked up even as she settled in the slight curve of Lestat's body. Her breath was fast and frightening on Lestat's collarbone.

"I feel as though I've lost gallons this night," she said. "Your love has left me famished."

"I do apologize--" Lestat began, trying to draw her closer, feeling the iciness on the body, seeing the translucence of the skin--

"And this room is a disaster. Surely we should call someone to clean it?" Heavy-lidded, ingenious eyes, sweet wicked monster's smile, and the telephone was right there. It was the penthouse.

Any request would be granted.

Lestat kissed her deep.

The poor lamb had no chance, though once she had crossed the threshold her eyes grew wide and terrified at the sight of Armida's pale form, the predatory gleam of Lestat's eyes from the bloody bed. 

The modern world was a watchful one. The days when one could kill a victim and dump them in a harbor without raising so much as an eyebrow were long gone. But she needn't know that.

"Sshh, sshh." Armida was gentle and terrible, a single stroke of her hand enough to reduce the poor woman to pliancy in her arms. And when she sank her fangs in Lestat's breath caught, enraptured by the living pulse of how they moved together, a performance of a heartbeat. But it wasn't a night for death. Not that kind.

"There, precious," Armida whispered in her ear, into her clouded mind. She was weak and woozy, but she would live. "Go home. Sleep, and forget what you've seen here."

Lestat brought her hands together as the door closed, giving the little show its applause. "That punk brat's made you soft." 

"She kills as readily as any of us. She's in love with it. Not like you." Armida's back arched tall and proud as she approached the bed.

"Haven't you heard?" Lestat smiled too broad, too fierce. "I'm the very devil, come for my worshipper."

"Louisa's fears." Staring at her again, distant and curious. "You claim pride in what you are, but you hide behind old superstitions. I've never understood."

Not Louisa's. Yes, Louisa was Catholic, carried the modern religion Maria had warned Lestat would make her simple and unreceptive to true reason. (Lie to her, pacify her, control her, but tell her no truths no matter how many times she asks, how swift and smothered her mind, how beloved and hurt, no matter the why, why,  _ why _ \--) But Louisa had never blamed or credited  _ Lestat _ for her damnation.

"Do you not know? I prayed to God himself to save my soul when Magnus took me," Lestat said lightly, stalking to the balcony with shoulders rolled back, stance deliberately unconcerned. "And He did not save me, any more than He interceded in Lucifer's fall." The city spread out below her, like Armida, like the two wondrous cruel beauties somewhere down there who had fomented this whole little space of time.

"And so you avenge yourself by becoming that which He would most hate?"

She laughed. "Didn't you tell Louisa that Satan is just another one of God's children?" And that made her laugh all the harder, leaning over the balcony. She had a vision of herself tumbling down, falling to earth as she was now, defiant in her nudity. The Prince of her own little garden. Her face fell. "All those poor souls, saying their prayers. And you and I will answer long before He ever deigns to." She thought of that woman, saved by nothing more than the relative inconvenience her death would cause. 

"She shows herself again." Armida was at her shoulder, arms linking around her abdomen. "My little innocent." 

"Now who's the liar, doll?" 

"Only an innocent could have broken what was three centuries in creation. I remember her still. I thought she had died when she ran afoul of my mistress." Tension, uncanny stillness. "Or with her violinist."

"Was it truly as terrible as Elias said?" Lestat stared out, away, not wanting to meet those tawny eyes and see a lie. (Or a truth, or a compulsion to believe.)

"Elias... cared for you. And for Nicola." The warmth of the woman she'd taken was rapidly leaching from Armida's porcelain-doll skin. "He wrote you many warnings."

"That isn't what I asked." The warnings had been clear and ignored; the pain of feeling Nicola's contempt had decayed away the heedless beauty Lestat had lived in with that love, Before. "I asked if it was so terrible, Armida. If there was no other way."

"She was strange, Lestat. She taught me how to keep a lover who knew less, to use them for one's own ends while they believe themselves to be the one fulfilled." The forehead on Lestat's shoulder and the tumble of hair felt like apology or apologia. "She taught me how to keep Louisa in love with me, even when it sickened within her."

"Answer the question." All of them, the ones she had spoken and the ones that hung unsaid over a hundred and a hundred more years. "Or I'll throw you from this balcony." It would be beautiful poetry to see her fall, see her lay as broken porcelain on the street below. 

"She asked for death." Armida's voice was carried away on the wind, and yet it seemed to invade Lestat's bones. "And I gave it. Perhaps I thought it would free her. Or free your love for her, that she kept without wanting it. That it might free you to love me."

"I hated you." 

"And I punished you. The same as you might do now." Armida came to stand beside her, joined her in looking down. "Will you? Or will you let me have you at last, as I've longed to since we met?"

Lestat had spent centuries punishing the world for her own injustices, from her birth as a daughter rather than a son onward. She'd punished every lover since Nicki for not being what she only ever  _ believed _ Nicki to be.

She would be within her rights, as Prince in this Savage Garden, to toss Armida down to the streets: yet another retaliation in their endless string. She would be within her rights to fly back to that little hovel with dawn threatening, set tender youngling Danny aflame, and drag her Louisa back by the short-trimmed hair for yet another century of resentful, imprisoning love.

No man nor God would stop her. None  _ could _ . She made herself and was made into something stronger and brighter and more dangerous, glittering like a blade in a spotlight.

"'The luxury of the strong,'" she murmured instead, tilting that sweet heart-shaped killer's face up and stooping more than a handspan for a kiss. "It won't last, you know."

"Better than you do, cara mia," Armida replied, those terrible eyes still closed, small hands fisted in Lestat's damp mane. "Did I not say? All the more reason to take what we can, when we can."

And well she knew those words, and the beautiful destruction they wrought. Had Armida been with her all  this time, whispering devastation in her ear? Or had she carved herself so deeply that this pretty mimic parroted her words back now as her own? 

There was no telling anymore, not even as she sealed their lips together and let Armida draw her inside, let those sweet fangs pierce her neck and wreak theft on her hungering, untouched body while the sky grew grey outside. Locked together, neither able to stray far for all that they hurt each other. Loved each other.

In a night, or a week, or a month, perhaps Lestat would go to Louisa's home with a bouquet of roses and plenty of sound to herald her approach. Perhaps she would knock and ask to be allowed inside, sit and talk and remember the better times they shared. She would not ask, not until Louisa was willing to tell or (more likely) Danny rashly proclaimed what they were, whatever that was.

And maybe it would work, for a time; they could have those moments in their eternities.

For now, until it ended, she had this love, scarred, torn and older than the other times. She could learn.


End file.
